Behind Those Cool Squirts in Summer, Many Plumbers

The parks department’s plumbers must keep not only the city’s drinking fountains in order, but other fountains as well, like this one at Elmhurst Park.Credit
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

So many fountains. So little time.

That might be the mantra of the parks department’s battalion of plumbers: 43 men with the unenviable task of keeping 3,114 drinking fountains flowing in the hot summer months, just as millions of parched New Yorkers and tourists descend on playgrounds, ball fields, beaches and parks.

A key lieutenant in the struggle is Gus M. Menocal, a licensed master plumber who oversees all of Queens. That some of the pipes delivering those cold, satisfying sips date to the 1930s is the least of his worries. He also deals with thieves who, under cover of darkness, pry off bronze bowls and brass valves to sell for scrap. He contends with children who, in the light of day, pour sand down drains, shove twigs in spouts and leave water balloon shrapnel behind. He chafes at ball players who wash their cleats in fountains. (“Ball field clay is the worst,” he said.) And, always, there are trees, whose pollen does more than agitate allergies; it is also a notorious clogger of traps, the J-shaped pipes that carry water away.

It is perhaps a minor miracle, then, that the drinking fountains work as well as they do. The parks department estimates that 93 percent of drinking fountains accomplish their main goal — providing fresh water — at any given time. That’s not to say that all fountains display the most robust pressure or the swiftest drainage. Far from it. “From a usability standpoint, there are tons of challenges,” said Adrian Benepe, commissioner of the Department of Parks and Recreation. “Summer can be rough on fountains. But most park users want to know if they can get a drink.”

In recent years, amid budget cuts and shrinking staff, maintaining the more than 1,900 parks has become an ever greater challenge. Even with new parks and esplanades opening every month, the annual maintenance and operations budget has trended downward, falling by $54 million in the last four years. Last week, the city took the politically risky step of soliciting corporate sponsorships for basketball courts and dog runs to find new revenue for park maintenance.

The city’s plumbing work force has held steady. Nonetheless, plumbing supervisors like Mr. Menocal seem to operate in triage mode, scrutinizing service requests to decide what should move to the top of the list. Broken fountains — both drinking and decorative — compete with balky toilets and sprayless showers. “We chip away at the high-priority orders,” he said. “It changes from day to day. It’s a living, breathing thing.”

In a generally positive report card on the maintenance of large parks, New Yorkers for Parks, an advocacy group, last year singled out drinking fountains as a weak link, assigning them a D grade, on average, for a range of problems.

Photo

A drinking fountain being repaired in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.Credit
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

The report considered more than whether drinking fountains basically worked. It also took into account water pressure, leaks, structural integrity and the presence of glass and litter. “We have been surveying the conditions of a host of parks features for almost a decade, and consistently, drinking fountains score at or close to the bottom,” said Holly M. Leicht, the group’s executive director, adding that she found the city’s estimate of the percentage of working fountains surprising.

“With the administration rightly encouraging us to drink New York City tap water and reduce plastic bottle waste,” she said, “it’s incumbent upon the city to keep drinking fountains in working order, especially in our parks.”

On a breezy afternoon in Queens, Mr. Menocal, a 44-year-old Bronx native who learned the plumbing trade from his father, was juggling 100 active work orders, including some for drinking fountains. A few of those were in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, a giant among park properties at 1,255 acres and a plumbing monster, with miles of water mains and 103 drinking fountains.

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He pulled up to a set of three boxy concrete drinking fountains, circa 1939, that were halfway between the Unisphere and the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. One of them was a “leaker,” meaning its bubbler — the unit containing the nozzle and push button — was dribbling water through a faulty joint. “It’s wasting water,” said Mr. Menocal, as he strode up to the fountain, holding a new bubbler cartridge. He took out a socket wrench, replaced the bubbler and pressed the knob again. The leak was gone, but water shot past the basin. He made one adjustment and the water stayed put. “We like to have a nice little arc that comes right into the middle of the bowl,” he said.

Nearby, a more modern drinking fountain was awaiting an overhaul at Meadow Lake. It had been vandalized some time during the winter. Thieves had ripped off the bronze bowl, taking the brass valve assembly and copper pipe for good measure. Replacement of the missing parts alone would run upward of $1,000. “These guys probably had a hammer and chiseled the tamper-proof screws,” Mr. Menocal said. “They use crowbars, hammers, whatever they can get their hands on.”

More expensive still are the dry well jobs. Instead of draining into the sewer system, drinking fountains sit atop submerged beds of gravel, called dry wells, that allow water to seep into the ground. But when sand, dirt and clay wash down the drain, dry wells become compacted and the water has nowhere to go. So it sits in the bowl. Mr. Menocal identified three dry wells in Queens that would need replacing this summer. Coordinating the excavators and plumbers, landscapers and stone masons, can take several days.

Mr. Benepe conceded that, as a boy growing up on the Upper West Side, he and his friends were sometimes guilty of drinking fountain abuse. Their weapon of choice was not sand, however. “One of our favorite tricks was to jam Popsicle sticks into the spout” so that the water would run until it was cold, he said. “Out of guilt for that, I’ve devoted 27 years to the parks department.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 15, 2012, on Page A30 of the New York edition with the headline: Behind Those Cool Squirts In Summer, Many Plumbers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe